(Meeting with DoD
National Media Pool bureau chiefs. Handouts distributed at
the meeting are on the Web at
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Dec2001/d20011213media.pdf
)

Clarke: Let's get started. I thought I'd do a
couple of things, and you've got the attachments. Most of
you had already seen the memo I sent out last week on the
6th apologizing for the screw-ups and giving you a sense of
the steps we were going to take, had taken, to try to
address them.

Just an update on that, let's leave
the media selection for awhile. If you go to near the end of
your package here, "The Way Ahead in Afghanistan." They're
coming around.

We have made some progress in terms
of facilitating media in Afghanistan, our primary interest,
obviously. Such as the coalition press centers in Bagram and
Mazar-e Sharif are up and running. The one in Bagram has
more people, it has five people, probably will have more.
Mazar-e-Sharif I think right now has two.

There
are, if you look at this, there are some interesting things
going on in Bagram and Mazar-e Sharif. I know everybody's
primarily interested in what's going on with the Marines
down in the south, but there are some pretty interesting
things going on in both areas. And as you'll see, behind
that page we have contact names and numbers -- for you, for
your people -- to try to facilitate some of that.

My strong recommendation is that as a starting point, so
many of your correspondents really have already started to
make the inroads, get in there, those sorts of things. Jeff
Alderson is very good and very helpful; and Major Winchester
at NavCent in terms of logistics, who's on what list, who's
getting on what planes in and out of Bahrain, things like
that.

On the second page of that, if you're
specifically interested in Bagram and Mazar-e Sharif, start
with Lieutenant Colonel Bonnie Herbert who's in Kuwait.
Those are two very good places to start.

Again, I
want to emphasize a lot of your people who are over there in
the region have already started to make these sorts of
in-roads. Some people are just showing up, for instance, in
Bagram. We help them out when they appear on the
doorstep.

Q: (inaudible)

Clarke: If
you're interested in Bagram, Mazar-e Sharif, that's a good
place to start.

Q: -- find out where they are in
Mazar-e Sharif?

Clarke: Right. And what's going
on, what sorts of things. Craig's tried to give us a sense,
on the page called "The Way Ahead in Afghanistan", on number
four and number five there of the kinds of activities that
are going on right now or are about to be happening. Bonnie,
for instance, and Jeff Alderson can give you an even more up
to date sense of the activity.

Q: [Sandy Johnson]
Do you have numbers for the people who are actually
there?

Clarke: No, because they've got an Iridium
satellite phone and it gets very complex. We hope to have
sometime soon, as they improve communications, e-mail
capability. But Jeff and Bonnie are the ones who are really
doing the bulk of the logistics.

Our main
challenge continues to be transportation. We're working hard
to improve that. But for instance if somebody is in or near
Bagram, we can help them out. We can't physically get them
there now, but if they are in or near Bagram we can help
them out. The same thing with Mazar-e Sharif.

Q:
So how do we find them? If we have to do there, how do we go
about finding them?

Clarke: Call Bonnie, call
Jeff.

Q: (inaudible)

Clarke: We are
working on a shuttle service. We are trying to get a plane,
a C-130 dedicated just to this. Craig's theory is that it
would act almost as a shuttle service, literally. Come out
of Bahrain, go to the three points, just keep shuttling
around. Dropping people off, picking people up, those sorts
of things. So we are trying to make that happen.

Q: Right now with Iridium phones people are having trouble
contacting Bagram so that's probably --

Clarke:
That's probably why, yeah.

Q: [Bob Pearson] On
number seven, is there a rough time frame of when you hope
to have this?

Clarke: No. We hope to have it soon.
But no. I'll keep you up to date on that.

And
coming out of Bahrain right now, Thursday, we're taking
another 12 into Rhino.

Q: Is the pool that's in
there now coming out?

Clarke: The pool that is in
there now, the last time we checked last night, is going to
stay. It's going to stay. General Mattis agreed to make
arrangements so they could stay.

Q: When you
expand to 12 will it still be pool? At what point are you
going to cease that?

Clarke: For now it is, and
actually you guys can give us some advice here. My sense is
that when we can get a better flow of transportation going
then that's the time to break out of the pool status. But
you guys tell me. The goal and the intent is to keep moving
towards that because we don't like pools any more than you
all do, but for right now we have very little limited
transportation to those places that people want to go. What
do you think?

Q: I think until news organizations
that want to go can, they should have access to the pools.
The more you have there, the less people will rely on them
who are there, but for those who still can't make it, I
don't see any harm in keeping the system going.

Clarke: Okay.

Q: How many news organizations do
you have trying to get in that haven't been able to?

Clarke: Craig's the best judge of that because he keeps the
most up-to-date list, but my sense is it's not a whole lot.
Maybe under ten.

Q: But you can't go there on
your own even if you wanted to. So I agree with Owen, until
that's the case --

Q: Yeah.

Clarke:
Okay.

Q: What's your best guess about when --

Clarke: Don't have one.

Q: It's mostly conceptual
right now as opposed to --

Clarke: No, Franks and
others have said yeah, we can fly, pull out a plane which we
use just for this purpose. A good sign. It's a matter of
finding one.

Q: I've only got one military
reporter and I'm keeping him here, but I would love to get
him over there. I asked this question before. Does he have
to be in Bahrain to get him over there?

Clarke:
Right now, and George makes a good point. If you guys for
the transcript, I'm sorry, could identify yourself and your
organization.

Q: Debra Howell, Newhouse.

Clarke: Thank you.

Right now the best place to be
is Bahrain. We're bringing transportation in. That may
change, but right now that's the best place to be. But more
and more people are going in all the time.

Q:
Sandy Johnson with AP. What about Kabul? We've got reporters
there, but now that we've got a presence at the embassy and
the runway and I don't know where else, it would be useful
to us to have a press contact there.

Clarke: We
don't have anything set up yet. It's still a very, very
small number of U.S. there, so we'll keep you guys up to
date on that, but right now plans are very slow.

Q: Do you know if (inaudible) person?

Clarke: I
don't know, but I can find out.

If there's not any
more on that, let's switch to the draft guidelines for
selection for the secretary of Defense trips. We stamped
draft on it for a reason. It's very much a work in progress.
Very much based on a point-for-point response to what issues
and concerns people have raised, but it is very much based
on the things that people said we should be considering as
we try to come up with some fair, equitable and predictable
process. It is, some are qualitative and some are
quantitative considerations, but it comes down clearly to
size and scope of the different news organizations.
Something that's very important to me is ongoing commitment
to the Pentagon. Something that is very important to me and
I probably don't communicate this very well to others, just
because an audience may not be huge doesn't mean it's not
important, so we're trying to have some diversity, we're
trying to have some balance here. Nobody's going to be
completely happy, I know that, but if we bring a heavy dose
of predictability to this then I think we do ourselves a lot
of good.

So I'll just open up the floor. I've
talked to several of you individually and we've taken those
on board. This reflects something of -- we didn't put a date
on it, but probably 10 days ago. So I'll just open it up for
questions and comments and insults.

Q: Torie,
Clark Hoyt from Knight-Ridder.

This list, among
other things that I think large newspaper people would find
objectionable, this list takes care of television and wire
services entirely before the first large newspaper person is
included, and you're cutting from the bottom so that becomes
very significant when you have limited numbers of seats. And
I think you got a letter from Doyle McManus last week. If
you work out the numbers, essentially every television
network has about three times the opportunity to be included
on a trip as do the large newspaper organizations that are
committed to Pentagon coverage and have been
historically.

Clarke: I want to set this up like
(inaudible). So TV people can respond.

Q: It's not
only TV people. Carl Leubsdorf of the Dallas Morning News.
But I think there would be a question on the wire services,
too. AP there's obviously no question; Reuters, not a great
question. When you get to AFP, which does not I don't think
serve very many United States outlets, basically, and that
they're in ahead of the New York Times and the Washington
Post and it just seems to be not right.

Q: I agree
with that.

Q: Yeah.

Q: I agree with
that, too.

Q: Same here. Many of us do.

Q: Torie, John Broder with the New York Times.

Have you compiled a list of, for this example, large
newspapers that have what you consider an ongoing
commitment? How do you define that commitment and how large
is that universe? Is that five or six big newspapers that
travel regularly? Is it two or three? Is it 10 or 15?

Clarke: I'm sorry, define which list.

Q: [David
Shribman] This is the universe of large newspapers that
demonstrate an ongoing commitment to covering the Pentagon
and traveling with the Secretary. Do you know what that
universe of newspapers is? So we can calculate the
likelihood of getting a seat on any given trip.

Clarke: Sure. The obvious ones are, and I should try to
figure out alphabetical order. The obvious suspects are New
York Times, Wall Street Journal, L.A. Times, Washington
Post, USA Today. Who am I missing?

Q:
Knight-Ridder.

Clarke: Knight-Ridder. Large news
organizations. Those are the major ones that consistently,
well, are committed to the Pentagon that consistently want
to travel.

Q: David Shribman from the Boston
Globe.

Am I to understand that print organizations
with circulations over 500,000 but which do not cover the
Pentagon on a regular basis can be eligible to be included
among the small newspaper, news service, magazine category?
Is that correct?

Clarke: Uh huh [affirmative] This
was hardly ever an issue prior to September 11th.

Q: Torie, Clark Hoyt again.

Just to clarify the
point that John was asking about, the way these categories
are set up, you've just listed six news organizations, but
then you need to add at least three more because you've
lumped magazines in with newspapers.

Clarke: Uh
huh [affirmative]. [Brian] just made that point. I just
forgot. I apologize.

Who don't often, and until
recently, did not want to travel. I've only been here since
the end of May, we did a few trips, and I can't remember a
news magazine asking to travel prior to September 11th.

Q: Torie, Tobin Beck from UPI.

I also would argue
for including us as a wire service, and if it's a question
on reach and circulation, how much reach and circulation are
you talking about?

Clarke: As I said, there are
some quantitative and some qualitative factors here. That's
just the way it is. I wish we could just make it
quantitative criteria, but you can't.

Q: [Tobin
Beck] So is there a reason why we're not included with AP,
Reuters and AFP?

Clarke: Probably several reasons
including size of reach. I don't apply one criteria to each
organization, I apply several criteria to each organization.
There's size and scope, there's ongoing commitment to the
Pentagon, which UPI clearly has. On some things it comes out
better than others.

Q: But our daily readership
being conservatively in excess of 2.5 million, would that
qualify? [UPI]

Q: [Carl Leubsdorf] Where is that
readership? Is it domestic newspapers and television and
radio stations?

Clarke: [Tobin Beck] It's
primarily web sites. We're on about 60, I would guess,
newspaper web sites. A total of around 1,000 web sites
overall.

Clarke: Which we did not factor. We
factor in with other organizations, if we did the numbers
would probably be even much higher.

Q: Owen
Ullmann, USA Today.

I think my main concern about
the way you have the list structured is that if you were to
go back and take any period, one, two, three, four, five,
ten years, I think you would find that for the six major
newspapers, news organizations, under this rotation we would
have a chance to go on about a third of the trips, which
would be significantly less than we're seeing all these
organizations have traveled in the past when there was no
war. In a sense, we're being penalized because now everyone
wants to go and yet other news organizations, perhaps not
the wires, but I suspect TV would actually be traveling more
than they did when there wasn't a war and that may be true
for some other media as well.

I think it's
important for, the idea is to have a level playing field and
fairness, the rotation should at least reflect the
commitment not just of covering the Pentagon in the
building, but I think covering the secretary when he
travels.

I think most of these large news
organizations have traveled at least half the time if not
more often, and if that same kind of parity can be
maintained, I think that is fairer than because now it's a
bigger story.

I know on a lot of trips TV was not
interested in going prior to this.

Clarke: Again,
my experience goes back to the end of May. I think they were
on --

Q: [Owen Ullmann] Going back several
years.

Clarke: Okay, I'm sorry, just telling you
what I experienced.

Q: [Owen Ullmann] It wasn't
worth it for them to cover --

Q: It depends on
what you're talking about. I'm Robin Sproul from ABC. But in
the smallest conceivable pool this reflects the numbers from
'85 on, the Sidle Commission, the smallest conceivable
pools. TV can't -- we're here every day with four people
usually, each of us, because we have a two-person crew, most
of us have two correspondents full time covering the
Pentagon. I think we routinely travel. And we're not only,
you talk about reach, we not only blanket the country among
the five of us, and one of my shows can hit seven million
people, but we also have an international reach. We're
feeding, this is the product that goes on the BBC and we
feed the total international television audience too. And
technically you can't get smaller [for] television. I'm
talking about people who are feeding satellites and shooting
pictures, and I think we have an outstanding record of
filling every seat ever given to us.

Q: [Owen
Ullmann] You can go to the tape and look over the record. I
think that's what we need to do. We can easily, I'm sure you
must keep records. I think it would be very instructive to
go back, take a time period that it should be, at least five
years, take ten years, trips by secretaries of Defense, and
let's find out quantitatively who has gone and paid and who
hasn't, and then we don't have to debate about what the
record is. I think that would be very helpful in determining
the criteria.

Clarke: I'll be happy to do so. It
will be one factor. That's what I'm trying to say.

Q: -- the reach and the potential and the commitment.

Clarke: It's definitely one factor. I have a very soft spot
in my heart for those organizations that have covered this
place for the long haul, and it goes way before my time. So
I hear what you're saying, but I just want -- everyone will
find the criteria that works best for them in their news
organization, which totally makes sense. That's human
nature. What I'm saying is it's going to be a balance of
those things.

Q: Torie, Clark Hoyt again.

We had a discussion about this at a prior meeting and I'd
just like to bring the point up again. You're reserving a
seat for a pool photographer. That's a still photographer,
not a television camera operator. I really question the
wisdom of that as somebody representing a print
organization, the benefits from still photographs.

I just think that the nature of these trips is not nearly as
photographic as it is repertorial. Reserving a seat for this
purpose doesn't make sense to me, and I think if you
canvassed the print organizations involved in this, I think
you would obviously not get unanimity, but I think the
preponderance of opinion --

Clarke: Why don't we
--

Q: Tim Aubry from Reuter Pictures. (Laughter)
Now we'll go to the other side.

As the saying
goes, everybody can't be happy all the time. I'm certainly
willing to tell you that I think the photo people should be
moved up in the line. Now that goes against obviously what
Clark's thinking. But every news organization here, even
television, not necessarily (inaudible), would have access
to these pictures and use the pictures to go with it.

Times have changed since September 11th. We have traveled --
most of the time we don't have a problem not traveling with
the secretary because we can get access to them on the
ground. We have asked specifically in these type situations,
and the ones we've pushed the hardest on are the ones that
are going overseas, the ones where we can't get access on
the ground. We can't get to these guys on the ground.

When the secretary goes in, I don't know where he's going on
the whole trip, but when he goes in we can't get our guys on
the ground to get to him. We'll cover him on the ground if
we can, but we can't get to him. We're not asking for three
wire photographers or 12 photographers representing -- we
want one photographer. The same way radio has asked, one
person to represent every organization that's out there. We
are one of the two groups that have agreed to pool -- I mean
television agreed to pool and they still have more people
on. We've agreed to pool, we're asking for the basic minimum
to help us do what we need to do.

And as much as
every one of these correspondents want to go out there and
do it, there would be no pictures to go with it. I'd like to
say that I think the pictures are important. That's what I
do every day and they are important. They run in the
newspapers, they run on wires, they run on the television.
When television has access to it, television uses a lot of
our still images as the stuff that Mr. Howlander did coming
out of Camp Rhino did in the very beginning. An awful lot of
every television station used those pictures. They're
available to everybody, they're out there, they tell a
story. I think we need to have them.

Like I say,
that's one person working for every news organization
instead of one person working for a large newspaper, and
we've just got to take the stuff individually. That's my
feeling but I feel very strongly about it.

Clarke:
Anybody else?

Q: Vicky Walton-James for the
Chicago Tribune.

When you are reviewing the news
organizations that have traveled with the Secretary and
those who haven't, I would just ask that you consider those
of us who often want to travel with the Secretary but aren't
chosen.

I would also point out if you go back and do that research
that the networks traditionally, we have a mechanism called
a VIP pool. While you may not see an ABC correspondent on a
former secretary's plane, that's because we have agreed to
pool and we had one correspondent in the pool or whatever
we've been allowed. So all five networks are always
represented when there is a TV -- So just in terms of your
research, it's not the organization itself who gets the
credit, but all five networks who use that material and
sacrifice what we have to sacrifice in order to do it that
way.

Clarke: I have to say, the networks and the
photo folks have done a good job of organizing themselves,
coming together with a consensus about how to do this. The
last thing we want to do is micromanage this so I appreciate
those efforts and the work that you all put into that.

Q: David Shribman of the Boston Globe again.

Are
the travel arrangements for domestic trips different than
foreign trips, Torie?

Clarke: We weren't planning
on it to be.

Q: It's obviously easier to have a
bigger or a second plane.

Clarke: We need far
fewer staff, the secretary needs far fewer people traveling
with him, there's far fewer security requirements, that sort
of thing. So we have more seats on the plane. And generally
less interest, too.

Anything else? Anything
glaring that's missing? Owen?

Q: We don't address
the issue on the larger plane, what the pool rules would be.
It sounds like TV already has an agreement on that they
won't all go. But the newspapers do not. We (inaudible) you
go and you do what you want, and those who want to go but
can't go are sort of stuck.

I do think it's
important if you do have rules that you sort of buy onto,
that we need to have some arrangement, much like pools in
the field, that newspapers have one, access to what the
Secretary is saying on the plane -- whether it's on the
record or background or whatever, that it's made available.
I think we talked about those that signed up and again
qualified for being in the pool. I think that's kind of
important if we're going to buy into some rotation where we
wind up going less often than we have before or want.

Clarke: I'd say two things. One, thanks to Vic, we try to do
a pretty efficient job. Anything that gets done on the
plane. The secretary walks back for five minutes or meets
with people for 15 minutes, or if somebody comes back and
does a backgrounder we record it, transcribe it, and the
first chance we get we send them back here and it gets
posted pretty quickly. We've had arguments with people on
the plane saying hey, we got to come on the flight, you
should hold that until we've done our story. Which we have
not yet agreed to.

A request, really, why don't
you get some of your colleagues together and figure out how
you would do something like that. I mean just pool, the
word, drives me crazy. So I tend to try to stay away from
it. The networks have done a great job of organizing
themselves, how they want to handle these things. But I
think that's up to you all to get together and decide if
that's something you want to do.

Unless somebody
has anything else, what we will do is take this on board,
wash it around with people here, come up with another
version. I'm not going to put a time line on it.

Q: One issue, Tom Seem, CBS.

There have been some,
and I think you've addressed this in the document or set of
documents, filing time after the Defense secretary makes
comments at various different stops. That's been a problem
for us, especially [when we need it to make news], and our
folks have been hustled right out to the next country and so
forth. Is that --

Clarke: That is [Wyatt Andrews],
this is my language, still whining about what happened in
Red Square. Everyone stay put for five minutes. (Laughter)
To the extent possible, we build in filing time, and I wish
Vic were here, because Vic Warzinski regularly does an
extraordinary job of finding means and abilities for people
to file.

If anybody hasn't caught on by now, if
you travel with Secretary Rumsfeld, he's prepared to go hard
and go fast, and don't look for any gold-plated situations.
It just doesn't exist.

The fact of the matter is,
Secretary Rumsfeld, to my knowledge, based on what your
correspondents have told me, is the only secretary of
Defense who has gotten reporters into the Kremlin for
events. He has done that twice. I know exactly what [Wyatt]
was whining about. There was a meeting with Ivanov which ran
late, which was a very good thing, which made us late for
the meeting with Putin, and the meeting with Putin ran late
which was a very good thing, and then they came out and did
the press conference, the secretary of Defense and Ivanov
did, did the press conference, and let me remind you that
correspondents from the United States had not been in there
before. And we were late. We had to get on to the next
country to which we had events. And despite that we found a
way, we convinced the Russians to let them do their standups
in Red Square, which again, according to your
correspondents, told me has never been done before, and it
was pretty remarkable. And I'm sorry if they were rushed,
and I'm sorry if it was unpleasant. And --

Q: The
greater concern is not --

Clarke: The greater
concern is --

Q: -- what's going to happen Sunday
in Afghanistan.

Clarke: I don't know, what's
happening Sunday in Afghanistan?

Q: With the
upcoming trip.

Clarke: Nothing that I know of. No,
the greater issue is that we regularly make incredible
arrangements so your people can do their work and can file
and get the job done, and if somebody doesn't like it hard
and fast then they shouldn't travel with us.

Q:
Are there travel arrangements made for people on the ground
who can at least catch up with the secretary?

Clarke: Yeah, and I think we're generally pretty good about
that. It sort of depends on where we are. We're in some
pretty strange places sometimes. But we tend to link up
pretty closely with the Embassy and they're always trying to
do that but they're pressed, so we are always encouraging
that.

And one more thing, we are going to release
this in about half an hour, release the tape in about half
an hour, so it will be on the pool line, it will be posted
on DefenseLink, all those things. [ news release:
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Dec2001/b12132001_bt630-01.html
]

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